Enabling Resilient Manufacturing via Trustworthy Digital Threads

Research Team Leadership

• PI: William P. King, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Co-PI: Marianne Winslett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  

Project Overview

The digital thread for a manufactured product consists of all the data generated during its lifecycle, including the information captured during design, fabrication, supply chain, customer delivery, and in-service usage and maintenance. The ability to access this information in highly granular detail offers significant advantages to manufacturing organizations, including business metrics such as manufacturing cost and time to market. Digital thread also offers new vulnerabilities for manufacturing organizations.

The purpose of this five-year project is to conceive, design, develop, test, and transition to the field a production-grade architecture for trustworthy digital threads that satisfies the needs of the critical manufacturing sector, enhances manufacturing productivity, and significantly improves the robustness and resilience of the manufacturing sector. The project team’s industrial partners, connections to the digital thread research underway at DMDII, and access to the cybersecurity modeling and specification work at NIST will help ensure that trust, data provenance, and data integrity are integrated into digital thread industry standards as they evolve and coalesce.